The Economist April 30th 2022 53
InternationalDemographyAt home abroad
B
efore vladimir putin invaded Uk
raine on February 24th, many Euro
peans fretted that their region was getting
older and that more people were dying
than being born. Europe’s median age of 43
is nearly four years older than that of North
America, the nextgreyest region. The pop
ulation of the European Union is expected
to peak at just shy of 450m within the next
few years, then dip below 424m by 2070.
The prospect of dwindling numbers fright
ens many. It has been especially scary for
the formerly communist countries of east
ern Europe, where outmigration has com
pounded the effects of belowreplacement
birth rates. Andrej Plenkovic, Croatia’s
prime minister, called declining popula
tion “an almost existential problem for
some nations”. Demographic change is Eu
rope’s “third key transition”, alongside the
green and digital ones, says Dubravka Sui
ca, the vicepresident of the European
Commission for demography and democ
racy, a post created in 2019.
Among its many shocks, Mr Putin’s war
has delivered one of a particular kind to demographers, who tend to see the phenom
enon they study as slowmoving. Some
5.3m people—the bulk of them women and
children—have fled Ukraine since the war
began, the vast majority to countries bor
dering Ukraine on the west. Poland, which
until recently exported more people than it
received, has taken in more than half of
these. The population of Warsaw, the capi
tal, expanded by 17% inweeks. Hungary,
whose population had shrunk from 10.7m
in the mid1980s to 9.8m in 2020, has re
ceived more than 500,000 Ukrainians.
Numbers that big can change demo
graphic destinies. For countries such as Po
land, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hunga
ry and possibly the Baltic states “this crisis
is a watershed moment, shifting them
quickly to becoming immigration coun
tries rather than outmigration countries,”
says Tomas Sobotka of the Wittgenstein
Centre for Demography and Global Human
Capital in Vienna. The euhas extended a
uniquely generous offer to Ukrainians,
giving them the right to live, work and stu
dy in a host country for three years, privileges that refugees often struggle for years
to attain. That suggests Ukrainians will
have the chance to root themselves quickly
in new communities. If the refugees
choose to remain, they will lower the aver
age age of their host countries, provide a
needed infusion of relatively skilled la
bour and tilt the sex ratio towards women.
That may look like a silver lining to a
terrible tragedy, but the future of this de
mographic disruption is unpredictable. If
the war is short women and children will
probably return quickly to Ukraine to re
unite with husbands and fathers, who, like
all Ukrainian men, are compelled by the
government to remain in the country if
they are between 18 and 60. Any demo
graphic dividend, if there is one, will be
distributed unevenly among European
countries. And it will probably be dimin
ished by a decline in babymaking as a re
sult of the economic uncertainty caused by
the war. With just 1.6 babies per woman on
average, Europeans, before the war began,
were already among the world’s most re
luctant breeders.
For Ukraine itself the war is a demo
graphic disaster. Its population had
shrunk sharply because of emigration and
few births, though before the invasion peo
ple had begun to return because the econ
omy had improved. Since February more
than a quarter of the population has been
forced to move, including 7.7m people dis
placed within the country. The birth rate is
bound to plunge still further. Life expecK YIV AND VIENNA
How the war in Ukraine is changing the demography of Europe